Does it matter if you die from COVID or from something else?

That is a question for the “If it saves just one life” crowd. Ironically, the answer is “Yes,” but in the opposite way that they might think. A death from COVID, tragic as it is, is far preferable to society than some other forms of death, such as from murder or suicide or deaths of despair and social breakdown.

Public policy decisions are rarely about simply choosing between an unambiguous good and an unambiguous evil. Usually, the choices are between competing goods or mitigating competing evils. There are costs and benefits, and each has to be weighed and a decision must be made.

During the COVID pandemic, there was a laser focus on reducing COVID deaths. Most mitigations turned out to be worthless or harmful, but a few–vaccines for people at high risk–actually did some good for some people. Vaccine mandates, on the other hand, were a manifest evil.

But few people seemed to care about the costs of the interventions–and I don’t mean the financial ones, although those matter quite a bit as well–but the harm done to people in the name of “safety.”

It will take many years to count up the costs, and there are a lot of people working hard to keep the accounting as vague as possible and the data as hidden as it can be. But a lot of those costs are impossible to hide.

We all know about the learning loss to kids–and even that is grossly underrated, as nobody is measuring the learning loss to the students who just dropped out of school and who have never returned, and that numbers in the millions.

Another grossly underrated cost is in the lives of people who have been murdered and committed suicide due to the social breakdown that COVID policies instigated. Never in American history have murder and suicide rates skyrocketed as they did during and now after the pandemic. Thousands of people are dying by homicide who would not have had pre-pandemic policies stayed in place.

"It has been widely demonstrated that mental health suffered at the same time that mental healthcare provision was interrupted and this may be a factor involved in the increases in suicide.”https://t.co/0bNEgwITrz

— The Washington Times (@WashTimes) June 16, 2023

Deaths from COVID were a terrible tragedy, but the number of life-years lost due to a death at 80 and a death at 16 actually matters. A great-grandparent dying a year prematurely is sad; the murder of children is unforgivable. Ask the great-grandparent which they would prefer, and you know the answer. Not that we made the death of that older person easier–we isolated them from the greatest comfort in the world–their family–at the worst point in their lives.

The decline in mental health and the skyrocketing violence is tearing society apart in a way that deaths caused by a virus simply can’t by themselves. Lockdowns saved few to no lives in the end–you can’t stop an airborne respiratory virus and keep society even marginally functioning–but even if you could have the benefits would not have been worth the costs.

Homicides among older teenagers and suicides among adults in their early 20s rose during the COVID-19 pandemic to their highest levels in at least two decades, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday.

The CDC report on homicide and suicide rates among people aged 10-24 covered 20 years, from 2001 to 2021. It found the homicide rate soared by 37%, from 7.8 deaths per 100,000 people in 2019 to 10.7 per 100,000 in 2020, the biggest annual increase in those years. The suicide rate rose more slowly, reaching 11 deaths per 100,000 people in 2021.

What’s more, the homicide rate converged with the suicide rate in 2020 for the first time in a decade, said CDC statistician Sally Curtin, the report’s co-author.

“They both continue to increase,” Ms. Curtin told The Washington Times. “In 2021, a person aged 10-24 was about equally likely to die from suicide as homicide, about 7,000 deaths each.”

Suicide and homicide have become the second and third leading causes of death for people in that age range, she added in an email. The top cause is accidents, such as vehicle crashes, drownings and drug overdoses.

During the pandemic, homicides hit a new high for teens, and suicides hit a new high for adults in their early 20s.

It’s not just these deaths of young people that it is an issue. It is the destruction that caused them and the destruction that follows in its wake. Social trust is bottoming out. Trust in government and public health officials has cratered. The very ability of the government to address problems it can actually help with, such as the prevention of diseases for which vaccines actually do work, has been gutted. People are afraid to walk in cities. Crimes are skyrocketing.

All of these consequences tear society apart, and tearing society apart costs lives and ruins others.

Deaths from COVID, as awful as they are, are natural deaths in the end. And natural deaths are, to society, far less harmful than deaths from choices. Raging at the heavens over the unfairness of a virus is painful; raging at your neighbors and your public servants for killing a family member or destroying one’s life destroys society, and with it many more lives.

If we had followed the advice of the Great Barrington Declaration–do what you can to protect those most at risk, and keep society going otherwise–and almost none of what has followed in the wake of COVID policies would have happened.

It would not be all sweetness and light, but it would have been immeasurably better than it is.

As I wrote earlier today, in the UK (and certainly here in the US) nobody had given any thought to the costs that would follow a lockdown. We already knew that, but it needs to be pointed out repeatedly. Because we need to account for those costs and ensure something like this never happens again.

Unfortunately, the laptop class liked the outcomes overall and is defending the lockdowns and looking at using the same tactics elsewhere. We need to firmly establish the harms.

That means we have to force an accounting. Those responsible will never allow it otherwise.